Itβs an interesting debate whether facilitating illegal (but society-enabling and productive) projects like sci-hub and the drug parts of silkroad will have been worth facilitating illegal (but society-harming) projects such as ransomware, assassination, money laundering, etc.
People will disagree about what goes in the categories of illegal-good and illegal-bad.
Re:Introducing A16Z Crypto
by endlessvoid94 on Monday June 25, 2018 @07:34PM
(#17396734)
This is an excellent example. Thank you!
How does Scihub receive funding to support the service it provides?
If you tried to fund it using Paypal, Visa/Mastercard, etc., it's quite likely that those payment systems would have already blocked the payments from reaching the service providers.
Because it is substantially more difficult to prevent Bitcoin transactions from being added to the blockchain, you can move "payment system" further down the list of "things to attack." Now you've got DNS and some others at the bottom of the list.
Furthermore, Bitcoins can be used to pay directly for things like VPS and other tech. I see over 92 Btc received at the address that pops up on Scihub's website, so this is a pretty big deal. (over half a million $ at today's going rate.)
So whatever the downfall of Scihub will be, it is very unlikely to be due to an attack (even a coordinated one) against the Bitcoin payment system.
That is the most obvious extant application of blockchain technology that provides a benefit to society:
* mostly publicly funded research locked away in proprietary databases
* illicit public database digitally publishing that publicly funded research
* Bitcoin used to pay to run the service that makes the public research available to the public
I don't think that is at all worth all the hype, energy, and money being thrown at blockchain technology. Nevertheless it is a real answer to a real question.